What it is
Continuing Education runs the learning that is not a degree: professional certificates, single short courses, workshops, exam preparation, continuing-education units (CEUs) for licensed fields, and contract training for employers. It is built for people who already have a job and want a specific, current skill — not a four-year commitment. Open-enrollment topics rotate but consistently include project management, supervision and leadership, lean and quality, cybersecurity, industrial automation and controls, data analysis, instructional design, and grant writing. Most certificates are a stack of three to six short courses completed over a few months to a year.
Credit, non-credit and stacking
Courses come in two flavors. Non-credit courses award a certificate of completion or CEUs, have no admission requirement, and are the fastest route to a skill. Credit-bearing courses and certificates carry university credit on an official transcript, cost more, and — importantly — can often be applied later toward a Porter degree if you enroll, so a working adult can test the water with one certificate and have it count if they decide to go further. Prior learning assessment and approved industry certifications can also reduce what you need to take.
Format and cost
Delivery is arranged around a working schedule: self-paced online, live evening or weekend virtual sessions, occasional on-campus intensives, and cohort formats for certificates. Non-credit courses are paid per course or per certificate, usually a few hundred dollars each, with no financial aid but frequent employer reimbursement — Continuing Education will invoice an employer directly and provide the completion documentation their tuition-assistance program needs. Some workforce grants and scholarships cover high-demand fields; ask before you register.
Contract training for organizations
An employer can commission a program built for its workforce — same subjects, but using the company's equipment, terminology, and real scenarios, delivered on site or online on the employer's timeline. Faculty and industry instructors define the outcomes with the employer's managers and frontline staff, and follow-up evaluation checks whether the training actually changed how work is done. This is the same door as Employer Relations for companies that also want to recruit students.
Questions?
See the full staff & office directory for any phone number or email. Because this is a fictional parody site, addresses and phone numbers are illustrative and do not reach a real university.